Homeland Security is another department that saw almost unprecedented turmoil under President Trump, with five different directors under his watch, only two of whom were Senate-confirmed. (Earlier this year, the General Accounting Office found that Chad Wolf, the latest acting secretary of DHS, was not legally qualified to hold his job.) 

As The Washington Post noted earlier this year, “The White House has run the department as an instrument of policy and politics, appointing openly partisan figures to its top leadership ranks, where they serve in acting roles without the slightest pretense of a formal nomination.” Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who served as the department’s first secretary under President George W. Bush, told the Post, “The president has perverted the mission of DHS.”

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is also Cuban American, called Mayorkas a “smart and natural pick” to lead the DHS. “He has the subject matter experience to take on the enormous job of cleaning up after the disastrous and inhuman immigration policies that have torn lives and families apart under the Trump administration,” Menendez said in a statement.

Biden’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, could not be more different than the woman she will replace if confirmed, Kelly Craft. Craft, a longtime Republican with close ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell but with no diplomatic experience, had a brief and somewhat bumpy run as the Trump administration’s ambassador to Canada before being named as the replacement for Nikki Haley in 2019. (Trump’s original choice to replace Haley was said to be Heather Nauert, a former Fox News anchor.)

In contrast, Thomas-Greenfield is a three-decade veteran of the State Department who served as ambassador to Liberia, director general of the foreign service, and top diplomat for Africa before leaving the State Department during the early months of the Trump administration. Although Thomas-Greenfield, 68, will not be the first Black woman to be the country’s ambassador to the U.N. (Susan Rice holds that distinction) nor the first African American in that position (Andrew Young held the job during President Jimmy Carter’s administration), she is a pioneer nonetheless. 

When she joined the State Department 35 years ago, she was one of the very few Black women to do so and one who came from a less-than-privileged background. In his formal announcement on Tuesday, president-elect Biden called her a “ground-breaking diplomat … who never forgot where she came from, segregated Louisiana” and noted that she was the first in her family to go to college. (Thomas-Greenfield is a graduate of LSU, attending that college in the 1970s, as part of the first wave of African American students accepted by that previously all-white school. Among her fellow students was David Duke.) In a TEDx talk last year, Thomas-Greenfield described her upbringing in the “Deep South … in a segregated town in which the KKK regularly would come on weekends and burn a cross in somebody’s yard.”